Call it by its actual title “Kong: Skull Island” or by its popular nickname “Apocalypse Kong.” Just don’t say it’s like any other giant ape movie.

The latest stab at reintroducing the stop-motion animation marvel from the classic 1933 original, “King Kong,” is first and foremost one big ol’ CGI monster fight show. Significantly more than that, it’s also not only a Vietnam War allegory, but the first major Hollywood production filmed primarily in that country. And somehow it’s also a more enlightened update that tries to make amends for the Kong mythos’s uncomfortable underlying themes of bestial sexism, racism and humanity triumphing over nature.

And have we mentioned “Skull Island” also boasts a vast, eclectic cast of characters who weren’t generated by computers? What makes that more impressive is how Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, “Straight Outta Compton’s” Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell, Toby Kebbell and others all manage to limn fairly dimensional, conflicted human beings amid all the massive monstrous mayhem.

Perhaps what’s most memorable about the whole complicated project is that the director who orchestrated it all, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, is only making his second feature here, following the modest indie teen flick “The Kings of Summer.” He’s the latest in a line of younger male directors who have taken the vertiginous leap from no-budget indies to huge effects blockbusters, such as Colin Trevorrow (“Safety Not Guaranteed” to “Jurassic World”) and Gareth Edwards (2010’s “Monsters” to 2014’s “Godzilla” reboot, which was the first film in Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures’ Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms hoped-for movie MonsterVerse, which now includes “Skull Island”).

Vogt-Roberts has certainly brought a more distinctive ambition to his first big studio project than others of his ilk.

“In some ways, this movie pays honor to the Kong films that have come before it,” figures Vogt-Roberts, sporting a “Duck Dynasty” megabeard grown over two years of “Skull Island” production. “But it also leans much more into being a full-on creature feature, like a kaiju film, whether it’s like seeing a creature fight in a Vietnam War setting or whether it’s more Miyazaki/anime-inspired quiet moments.”

There is that, along with sequence after sequence of deadly eye-popping action. “Skull Island” is set in 1973, when America was pulling out of Southeast Asia and satellites first mapped the entire Earth from outer space. That’s how the mysterious, constantly cloud-covered Skull Island is discovered. MUTO chaser Bill Randa (Goodman) wrangles not only government financing to explore the island, but also an escort from the just-demobilized combat helicopter squad commanded by Jackson’s Lt. Col. Preston Packard. Among many others also along for the Huey rides are Hiddleston’s British jungle survival expert James Conrad (nudge-nudge, wink-wink “Heart of Darkness” reference) and anti-war photojournalist Mason Weaver (Larson).

When the Hueys drop bombs on Skull’s unspoiled terrain, allegedly for geological survey purposes, they all get knocked out of the sky by the island’s 100-foot tall, fur-covered defender.

The survivors have varied views of what needs to be done next. Packard goes increasingly Colonel Kurtz — or is it Captain Ahab? — obsessive about destroying the big ape who killed so many of his men. Weaver and eventually Conrad develop a more peaceful coexistence approach to getting off the island alive. And the mysterious but quite benign natives of the place, along with a surprise longtime guest of theirs, make it clear that Kong is the only thing that stands between humans and much more dangerous, big predatory ugly things, like the ravenous lizardy Skullcrawlers.

Missing from this one’s scenario are Kong falling in love with the blond woman, being captured, climbing a tall building in New York and getting shot off it by aircraft, which were all components of the inelegant 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake and Peter Jackson’s overly reverent 2005 one.

“When they brought me the project, I said, ‘Cool, I love King Kong; let’s make a King Kong movie,’ ” Vogt-Roberts recalls. “But my next response was, ‘Why?’ Why do audiences want that? What makes it different. What separates it?”

The answer, as it turned out, was “Apocalypse Now.” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War classic was an initial inspiration to “Skull Island’s” first screenwriter, Max Borenstein, but he admits overthinking the concept to something more along the lines of Coppola’s template, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, “Heart of Darkness,” by the time Vogt-Roberts entered the picture. But the prospective director loved “Apocalypse” too and was amazed when the Legendary brass said, OK, let’s put Kong in that.

“It’s a movie I admire, and Jordan loves it too,” Hiddleston says of “Apocalypse Now.” “I think, to take a group of soldiers who have seen unimaginable things in conflict, who already have a depth of spirit because of their experiences, to put them in this environment is innately interesting. I think this film does raise questions about the nature of war, but also about the bravery and courage of soldiers.”

“I loved the idea of taking people who were disillusioned, caught between the old guard and the new guard, and thrusting them into this fantastical, ridiculous place and confronting them with gods and monsters and myths,” the director says. “But I also felt that we couldn’t appropriate the imagery of that time period, which was very charged for a reason, without saying something.”

More than any other character, Jackson’s Packard embodies “Skull Island’s” apocalyptic war critique.

“I had a really wonderful kinship with the military advisers,” Jackson explains. “A couple of them were actually Vietnam vets, which was great. So understanding, and having lived through, that particular era gave me a whole ’nother way of looking into and approaching it. So when you say, ‘The war wasn’t lost, it was abandoned,’ it has another sort of resonance for that character.”

Larson says her role wasn’t just to voice the pacifist sentiments of the time, but also to represent modern attitudes toward the female element in the Kong story.

“One of the reasons why I did this was to turn this allegory on its head a little bit and to respond to the fact that we’re in a different time right now,” the Oscar-winning “Room” actress says. “I think we’re ready to see a different type of female hero, and what’s interesting about Weaver is that, yeah, she’s strong and she’s tough, but she’s sensitive, too. Her strength is that she’s using her heart and her humanity to actually save all of them.”

For Vogt-Roberts, the physical as well as the historical/political resonance of Vietnam is what ultimately grounds his mad monster mash-up in something we puny humans can look at and, for a couple of hours, believe.

“I knew out of the gate that Kong was going to be CG and the creatures were all going to be CG,” the filmmaker notes. “So the goal was, how do you make as much of the rest of it as tactile and tangible as possible. Not only for the actors, and not only because I am somebody who thrives off of being in an environment and finding small moments of, like, Malick lyricism in a monster movie. But I didn’t want it to feel like a CG fantasy world.

“Vietnam has this element where it’s rugged and otherworldly, yet it still feels real. Yeah, we fused Australia and Hawaii in some scenes, but I can’t stress enough how much Skull Island is Vietnam.”

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.